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How Much of Your Money Wasted on ‘Climate Change’? Try $10.6 Million a Day

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how-much-of-your-money-wasted-on-climate-change-try-10-6-million-a-day/?singlepage=true 

While reading the budget requests for FY 2011, remember to be "civil." 
 
15 January 2011 by Art Horn

Seems everyone is talking about the massive United States federal deficit and how it has now reached an unfathomable $14 trillion. Is there any way to comprehend such a bloated number? Try this: the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. At that speed a photon of light starts at the surface of the Sun and reaches the Earth in 8 minutes. On Star Trek, the speed of light is warp one — at that speed the Enterprise would travel about 6 trillion miles in one year. If each dollar of the deficit is represented by one mile, it would take the Enterprise more than two years traveling the speed of light to go 14 trillion miles.

So what can we cut out of the federal budget to make any kind of dent in this enormous pile of borrowed money? We could start with the vast sums of cash being wasted on climate change research.

This year, your government will spend in the neighborhood of $4 billion on global warming research, despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, and despite all of the billions that have been spent so far yielding no conclusive evidence that using fossil fuels to make energy has any significant effect on Earth’s temperature.

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From the Washington Post

INTERESTING - READ TO THE BOTTOM
 
Global Warming?
 
The Washington Post

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some  places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to  the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

 

 

I apologize, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922.  It was reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 88 years ago!
 

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GOP targeting greenhouse-gas regs

'Last thing America can afford is to lock away our own resources' 

By Gene Koprowski
13 January 2011

New House Energy Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and his GOP colleagues figure the best environmental policy is for Congress to overturn the Obama EPA's greenhouse-gas regulations, and he's moving forward on that front, assembling a new legal team with the expertise to combat the rules critics describe as overreaching, WND has learned.

President Obama's policies have been "job killing," Upton told WND, and his committee will "take the lead" in the new Congress and "foster a new era of job growth, fight rampant regulations, fortify our energy security, cut spending and reduce the size of government."

The Democrats last year tried but failed to pass a law to limit greenhouse gases and enable companies to buy and sell pollution permits, an idea known as "cap and trade." Conservatives call the plan "cap and tax" because it would raise energy prices. The measure passed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House, even nabbing a vote from Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., but was not brought to a vote in the Senate.

Read full article at:

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=250657#ixzz1Az4eZqz0 

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Queensland floods: but at least the 'endangered' Mary River cod is safe, eh?

The Telegraph  James Delingpole   11 January 2011

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100071290/queensland-floods-but-at-least-the-endangered-mary-river-cod-is-safe-eh/ 

This is a guest post from one of our regular commenters, Memory Vault. He’s understandably upset about the Australian floods, which may have claimed more than 70 lives. But what really upsets him is that this disaster could have been prevented. He blames green campaigners so wedded to their ideology they never stop to consider the human consequences. It is to them his bitter letter is addressed.

Andrew Bolt has similarly harsh words for Australia’s eco nuts. Were it not for the actions of Environment Minister Peter Garrett, for example, the Queensland town of Gympie would not now be underwater. Unfortunately, Garrett took it upon himself to block the proposed dam that would have prevented it.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Wednesday said he made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species. He made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species

“The project would have serious and irreversible effects on national listed species such as the Australian lungfish, the Mary River turtle and the Mary River cod – both of those endangered.

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Green Groups Try to Sex Up Climate Change

SPIEGEL ONLINE

3 January 2011

By Axel Bojanowski

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere keeps going up and up, but public interest in climate change is sinking. Environmentalists are trying to come up with new ways to make the issue sexy. But shock tactics can backfire all too easily.

Climate change used to make headlines. But these days the issue appears to have largely fallen off the radar.

World leaders recently negotiated a new climate agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, but public interest in the issue was limited. It was a marked contrast to the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, which had been declared of historic importance in the runup to the meeting, only to then fail spectacularly. The theft of e-mails from the University of East Anglia had badly damaged the image of climate research shortly before the summit.

Environmentalists and scientists are concerned about the massive drop in public interest in the topic over the last year. Now they are looking for new strategies to turn the tide. They're searching for so-called "mind bombs" -- highly emotional images that reduce a complex problem down to one core message.

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Chris de Freitas: Emotion clouding underlying science of global warming

nzherald.co.nz        5 January 2010

Unlike most other hot button environmental issues, global warming is widely misunderstood. As a climate scientist thinking about this, it struck me that it was not surprising since accounts of the scientific basics of global warming almost never appear anywhere in the press.

There is not space here to include all the charts and numbers that might accompany such an account. In its place is a necessarily brief summary.

Most people are not shocked to learn that global warming discussions evoke polarised views, but many are surprised to discover that the scientific basics are not contentious. An awareness of these is helpful in building an understanding of the extent to which there is a problem and how it might be addressed.

On average, heat gained by the Earth from energy received from the Sun is equal to heat lost to space. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, regulate this heat loss.

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Who are the climate denialists now?

from Quadrant Online

by Walter Starck

January 2, 2011

In recent years anyone daring to question the imminent reality of catastrophic global warming has risked being labelled a denialist with implicit, and sometimes even explicit, reference to holocaust denial as well. Ironically, over the past year in the face of a cooling climate and collapsing scientific credibility, climate alarmists have themselves begun to increasingly express opinions that can only be seen as denialist.

Even though exposure of the Climategate emails and other material from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit was unequivocally a major blow to the credibility of AGW science, warmists reacted by trying to downplay the significance as being only an academic spat with no relevance to the scientific validity of any of the research involved. However, as it became apparent that serious breaches of scientific standards and ethics were involved, basic honesty should have called for a clear condemnation. By opting to attempt to dismiss such serious matters as only trivia, damage to credibility with the public was compounded.

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Wind farms not everything they're cranked up to be

Virtually all the main electricity generators in New Zealand have wind farms in operation, under construction or going through the Resource Management Act approvals process.

The primary driver seems to be that we need more renewable energy to "fight climate change" and that wind power is a very good way of doing this. It isn't.

The fundamental problem with wind power is that it is intermittent and unpredictable. This means that the system operator must take a pessimistic view and assume that no wind power will be available over critical periods.

In other words, he has to make sure that there are sufficient conventional power stations available to meet peak demands. It is often claimed that New Zealand has ample hydropower that can easily back up wind. While this tends to be true during a normal rainfall year, it is most definitely not true during a dry year. Dry years, not normal years, dictate the need for new power stations.

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